At the Movies

Last Saturday, I saw The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It’s a beautiful movie, filmed with care and respect for all of its characters. Stephen Chbosky did an excellent job adapting his book to the screen, a story of beauty and pain and broken people finding solace in each other.

I’m glad the movie was so good, because I had to sit through quite a bit of crap to get to it.

I saw a trailer for the upcoming Seven Psychopaths. It was a very abbreviated version of the tv spots and trailers I’ve seen in other movie theaters. It was so abbreviated, in fact, that even though the film is called Seven Psychopaths, only five of them were featured in the trailer. Any images of Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko, and in fact, their names, were completely missing from this version of the trailer. Gee, I wonder what Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko have in common? I hope eliminating all traces of the women in the trailer saved them a lot of time!

I also saw a sneak peek at the upcoming History Channel special, called The Men Who Built America:

This is another trailer that has no trace of women in it, but I don’t even have a problem with that in this case. (It’s a special about a very male-dominated industry; of course it’s not going to feature a lot of women.) No, my problem with this trailer has to do with the way that Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Vanderbilt, and Morgan are portrayed as badass rockstars.

Look at them talk about how innovative and badass they are by using oil! Look at them act all rebellious and tough by making lots of money! Look at Carnegie shove someone aside and yell, “Get out of my way!” with his masculine masculinity! Look at these rebels fight against the system LIKE A BAWSE.

Much has been written on the subject of hypermasculinity and portrayals of hypermasculinity in the media, but I worry for our culture’s future when aggressive, macho masculinity manages to permeate a damned History Channel Special. Is it really necessary to advertise a special about oil magnates the same way you would advertise an action movie? Why do marketers insist on always being aggressive, be-eing aggressive?